“Don’t patronize me,” Andrew said without much heat in his voice.
“I’m not patronizing you. You think it’s easy for me?”
Andrew shot him a sour look, his full lips pursing.
Logan fixed his gaze on the road.
“You’re not a mess,” Andrew said. “Not like me.”
“I feel uncomfortable around people, too.”
“But it isn’t as hard for you,” Andrew stated.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Why?” Andrew said, his voice full of bewilderment and misery.
Logan had to choose his words carefully. “I’ve gotten the impression that you always relied on your wife to be a steady presence for you. Your rock. You relied on her support a lot. Is that correct?”
Andrew didn’t answer immediately.
“Maybe,” he said at last.
“And then on the island…” Logan trailed off, unsure how to put it in a way that wouldn’t offend him.
Andrew snorted. “I used you like my comfort blanket.”
Smiling wryly, Logan said, “More of a teddy bear or a pacifier.”
“Maybe,” Andrew said with an uncomfortable chuckle. “So what? Get to the point.”
“My point is, it seems you’re used to someone grounding you. You don’t do well without it. Combined with the issue of adjusting to the real world, it’s understandable that you’re having a harder time.”
Andrew didn’t say anything, turning his face away to stare out the window.
Logan suppressed a sigh.
They remained silent for the rest of the ride.
When the car stopped in front of a nice, picturesque house in the suburbs, Andrew didn’t move to get out of the car. He was staring at the house with a strange expression, his face pale and his hands fidgeting with his seatbelt.
“It’s that one, right?” Logan said.
Andrew nodded woodenly, unbuckled the seatbelt, and slowly got out of the car. He took a few steps before freezing again.
Logan frowned and got out of the car, too.
Rounding it, he touched Andrew’s shoulder. “What’s—”
Andrew whirled around and grabbed him by his shirt. “I—I need— Don’t leave.” He flushed, a look of frustration and mortification flashing across his face, but his blue-green eyes remained wide and pleading.
Fucking hell.
“Okay,” he said, putting his own hands over Andrew’s and carefully forcing them to relax their grip on his shirt. He rubbed Andrew’s knuckles after that and squeezed them, watching the other man’s eyes glaze over.
Christ.
Logan clenched his jaw, his boxers suddenly a little too tight. Fixing his mind on the most disgusting things he could think of, Logan guided Andrew toward the front door with a steady hand on his back, ignoring the voice at the back of his mind that kept saying, What are you doing?
The woman that opened the door didn’t look much like her nephew. She was short and plump where Andrew was tall and fit, their curly brown hair the only thing they had in common.
She was already frowning when she opened the door, and her frown only deepened when she saw Logan. Her lips pursed briefly before stretching into a polite smile. “Good morning. I didn’t expect Andrew to bring a guest. You must be Logan, correct?”
Logan smiled amiably and engaged her in meaningless small talk, all the while observing her and her nephew.
Andrew barely seemed capable of looking at her directly. His body was so full of tension it was painful to look at. He seemed to be torn between sticking close to Logan and putting as much distance between them as possible.
It didn’t take Logan long to guess why. Although the woman was unfailingly polite, it soon became obvious that she didn’t approve of her nephew’s association with him. And since Logan was virtually a stranger to her, there was only one thing she could disapprove of: his sexuality wasn’t exactly secret. Now some things about Andrew were starting to make a lot of sense.
The conversation over the tea table was excruciatingly uncomfortable. Andrew barely spoke besides “Yes, Auntie” and “No, Auntie,” while Rebecca made her opinions known on a wide variety of topics that ranged from her nephew’s “disastrous hair” to his state of unemployment.
“You must take your company back,” she said sharply. “You absolutely must. Those people—the Rutledges—had no right to take away your company and hand it to someone else! You have worked for it for years, and you own ten percent of the company now that your wife is gone. You can’t just let them kick you out like a useless thing—”
“Yes, Auntie,” Andrew said, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but there.
And on and on it went.
By the time they finished their tea, Logan was this close to strangling that woman. The worst part was, she seemed to mean well, but her overbearing attitude was unbearable. Logan couldn’t imagine growing up under the woman’s care. Fuck, it really explained so much about Andrew. So damn much.
Although Rebecca all but ignored Logan, her displeasure about his presence in her house was glaringly obvious. Logan could never stand people like her: people who considered themselves too well mannered to be openly homophobic but who treated gay people with barely hidden disdain. No wonder Andrew had been such a bigot: the guy craved approval and praise so much, he’d probably subconsciously suppressed any “abnormal” leanings just to please this woman, and then overcompensated.
It pissed Logan off. He wished he’d had the willpower to say no when Andrew had asked him to stay. He wished he had remained oblivious to this. He wished… Fuck, he wished he’d had some self-control and remained in New York instead of all but running here just because Andrew had sounded upset over the phone. Damn it all.
Sometimes ignorance was bliss. It was bad enough that he had no self-control when it came to Andrew and couldn’t keep it in his pants. He didn’t need to feel sorry for him on top of that. Or protective of him.
But no matter what Logan told himself, he did feel it. The longer he watched Rebecca and her nephew, the harder it was to keep his mouth shut and not to snap at her to mind her own business. He didn’t like how small Andrew looked in this house. He didn’t like the way his shoulders were hunched defensively, the way his confidence seemed to completely disappear the longer they were there. It rubbed Logan the wrong way, made him want to put himself between Andrew and this woman and growl. It was pure instinct, no matter how ridiculous and bizarre it was, an instinct that was becoming harder to suppress with every minute.
Finally, he stood and said tersely, “Thanks for the tea, but we should go.” He grabbed Andrew’s wrist and pulled him to his feet, ignoring the startled, wide-eyed look Andrew shot him.
Rebecca looked at Logan for the first time in a while, her lips flattened into a line. “We? Truth be told, I’m a little lost. I’m not sure why you and my nephew are still associating, Logan. I understand that you were forced to coexist on the island in order to survive, but surely continuing such association is… inadvisable. Andrew needs to move on with his life, leave the island in the past.”
Logan smiled at her, aware that it wasn’t a very nice smile. It probably looked a little feral. He didn’t care; he was too pissed off to care that he was being rude. It didn’t matter that he’d come to similar conclusions himself—that he needed to keep his distance from the mess of a human being Andrew was—he was too annoyed now to agree with this woman on anything.